Education Commons^™

Introduction: History And Conceptual Basis Of Assessment In Higher Education, Peter Ewell, Tammie Cumming

Publications and Research

Assessment and accountability are now inescapable features of the landscape of higher education, and ensuring that these assessments are psychometrically sound has become a high priority for accrediting agencies and therefore also for higher education institutions. Bringing together the higher education assessment literature with the psychometric literature, this book focuses on how to practice sound assessment.

This volume provides comprehensive and detailed descriptions of tools for and approaches to assessing student learning outcomes in higher education. The book is guided by the core purpose of assessment, which is to enable faculty, administrators, and student affairs professionals with the information they …

Enhancing And Evaluating Scientific Argumentation In The Inquiry-Oriented College Chemistry Classroom, Annabel D'Souza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The research presented in chapters 2, 3, and 4 in this dissertation uses a sociocultural and sociohistorical lens, particularly around power, authority of knowledge and identity formation, to investigate the complexity of engaging in, supporting, and evaluating high-quality argumentation within a college biochemistry inquiry-oriented classroom.

Argumentation skills are essential to college and career (National Research Council, 2010) and for a democratic citizenry. It is central to science teaching and learning (Osborne et al., 2004a) and can deepen content knowledge (Jiménez-Aleixandre et al., 2000; Jiménez-Aleixandre & Pereiro-Munhoz, 2002). When students have opportunities to make claims and support it with evidence and …

Informal Order, Needs Analysis, And The Eap Curriculum, Faisal S. Al-Maamari

The Qualitative Report

The academic curriculum is developed through a systematic process whereby content is created through the alignment of needs to stakeholder or target group. This qualitative research study features a small-scale, English for academic purpose (EAP) needs analysis (NA) of three credit-bearing EAP programs and the corresponding departmental programs conducted at a Language Center at a higher education institution in Oman. Based on interview, observational and documentary data, the analysis showed divergences in academic literacy (writing and reading) between the EAP and content programs. Principally, the findings pointed to the presence and operation of a group of informal orders and the …

Assessment-Orientated Instructional Design Using Dream Approach, Juhong Christie Liu Ph.D., Andrea H. Adams, Wei Wang

Libraries

This presentation proposes an assessment-oriented instructional design approach to enhancing student learning with blended learning environments and report its pilot implementation. Students gain significant learning experience through understanding the relationship between learning outcomes and learning process, connecting acquired knowledge, being able to tackle problems individually or on teams, and learning how to learn (Entwistle, Tait, & McCune, 2000; Fink, 2013; Suskie, 2010; Wiggins, 1998). These components ought to be designed in learning activities to educate learners through formative assessment such as self-reflection, peer evaluation, and constructive feedback from instructor (Angelo & Cross,1993; Wiggins, 1998). In blended learning with online environments, …

What Impacts Do Oer Have On Students? Students Share Their Experiences With A Health Psychology Oer At New York City College Of Technology, Cailean Cooney

Publications and Research

This article reports findings from a study conducted with students in three sections of a Health Psychology course that replaced a traditional textbook with open educational resources (OER) as the primary course material. The purpose of the study was to learn how OER impacted students. Data were collected in Fall 2015 with students from New York City College of Technology (City Tech), of the City University of New York (CUNY), a comprehensive college located in Brooklyn. Students were assigned the OER by their course instructor, who developed it as part of a library funded OER pilot initiative. Two research instruments …

The Quantitative Reasoning For College Science (Quarcs) Assessment 2: Demographic, Academic And Attitudinal Variables As Predictors Of Quantitative Ability, Katherine Follette, Sanlyn Buxner, Erin Dokter, Donald Mccarthy, Beau Vezino, Laci Brock, Edward Prather

Numeracy

In this article, we explore the ability of demographic and attitudinal variables to predict student scores on the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science (QuaRCS) Assessment. Variables measured by the assessment include: students' academic choices and plans, attitudes and perceptions regarding mathematics, self-reported effort level, and basic demographics such as age, race/ethnicity, gender and disability status. As in previously published numeracy studies, we find significant score deviations according to gender, race/ethnicity, and disability status; however, the effect size of these correlations pale in comparison to the effect size of affective/attitudinal variables on QuaRCS score. A large number of variables with …